Utah John

We should be grateful that Benford has turned out so great, not concerned that Elam hasn't. Elam is still a great athlete and if he can learn how to play zone defense, he'll be a valuable member of the Bills.

The Patriots also stayed in a shell D for a long time in yesterday's game against the Dolphins. And Tua carved them up with a long series of short passes to wide open receivers. And yet at the end the Pats were almost in a position to win, with only an interception on a great play by a Miami DB taking away a scoring opportunity. That shell D is what a lot of teams are going to use when faced with a talented offense like Buffalo's or Miami's. It's the old bend but don't break philosophy -- let the other guys move down the field, then stop them in the red zone. Actually I hardly glanced at the boards last week. The anger and negativity were repulsive.

I don't think Cook ever had the level of criticism that Allen faced. He gradually got better last year as the year went along, and no one was calling him a bust or saying he couldn't play. He was Singletary's backup and that was the plan. Now he's the Man.

The most outrageous thing I heard criticizing the Bills came from someone who showed up on Sports Center -- not the usual bald guy host, but a visiting bald guy expert. He went on and on about how Josh Allen is still reckless -- with a couple of his trademark bullet passes into the end zone for TDs as examples. And he said the Bills were not good at running the ball, so Allen has to do it. I guess if you're an expert appearing on Sports Center you can spout all these widespread myths and get paid for doing it. Well, we can see better. What Allen can do is things that most QBs can't do, so when he does it it's not being reckless, it's being effective. And as far as not being able to run the ball, I think the bald guy expert didn't see what Cook cooked up, as well as how Murray and Harris gashed the Raiders up the middle. Cook's speed and ability to stretch the field sideways is exactly what the Bills have lacked and needed to open up the middle of the field for Diggs and Kincaid. If the O line can hold up and maybe even continue to improve, the offense will be deadly.

I agree completely. Everyone's saying the Bills caught a break when Rodgers went out. I am not sure that's right. The D line got into the backfield over and over, but usually Wilson evaded the rush. He's a good athlete and the number 2 overall pick in his year's draft. Rodgers used to be a very mobile QB back in the day but these aren't those days. I can easily see the Bills getting 5 or more sacks of Rodgers. The Bills D game plan was set to counter quick passes from Rodgers, and having a mobile QB back there was a different challenge. Most of the passes Wilson did complete were after he was flushed and ran around while his receivers got finally got open.

I watched most of the game. One takeaway is that it's just as well that Harrison Phillips left the Bills. The Eagles ran right over him, over and over. Another takeaway is that the Vikings are going to pay this year for all the good fortune they had last year. Things even out.

Without Rodgers the Jets are pretty much the same as last year. Excellent defense, and an offense that depends on a shaky QB, Zach Wilson. Of course it's true that Wilson has been learning and improving while Rodgers was there, so he could be better than last year, but they were a fourth place team in the AFCE for a good reason.

Amtrak has lines but hardly uses them. I live in Memphis, and it would be great to take a train south to New Orleans or north to Chicago for a weekend or other vacation. Amtrak has one train per day in each direction, and the departure and arrival times are terribly inconvenient for most of the stations en route. What's needed are trains every couple of hours, so passengers can have the flexibility to travel at their convenience instead of Amtrak's limited vision. Make the trains shorter if the number of passengers is lower, but this is how Amtrak could rebuild passenger service across America, reducing carbon emissions and helping passengers avoid airline schedule cancellations and delays, and airport crowds. Train travel is soooo much nicer than airplane travel.

No, he put a crushing hit on Lincoln, but Lincoln wasn't through. He actually ended up playing for the Bills later on.

The biggest non-play was all the times we didn't sack Zach, and he kept upright long enough to throw a good pass to a receiver who'd finally gotten open, over and over. In all the Rodgers hype about how the Jets had their offensive plans disrupted, let's not forget that the Bills D game plan was to contain and stop a less-mobile, older QB who was going to be in a moving pocket and hitting quick passes. Zach Wilson is a different challenge. He has a good arm and is good at escaping from pressure. Regardless of that, though, the Bills D line which was (once again, remember the Bengals playoff game) up against a supposedly inferior O line, only actually sacked the Jets QB a couple of times. Chasing Wilson out of the pocket was not good enough. No excuses for the Bills inability to stop Wilson.

I really don't think so. Daboll's ability as a HC is still in question. He's a great OC though, and the Bills certainly miss him.

Zach Wilson had one really bad pass, and Milano intercepted it. But Wilson had lots of really good fastballs on target. I am not anticipating the Jets falling apart without Rodgers. Their D is simply outstanding. And considering how good that Jets D is, the Bills offense did quite well at least in the first half.

Time and again, Edmunds would attack the line, and go into the wrong gap, leaving the middle of the field open and leaving it up to the safeties to prevent a big play. When he wasn't attacking, what he could do well was eat up space. He was huge and fast, and he could cut off big runs before they got big.

I don't think I heard Micah Hyde's name called all night, and Poyer was usually trailing the ball carrier so we got a good look at the back of his jersey. But the problem was bad gap choices by the MLB and safeties on run support. Shades of Edmunds...

Why are people on this board so nasty? Calling something ridiculous is simply over the top.

Who knows how good Jones, Waller, and the rest of the Giants' offense skill position players are. Without an O line the entire offense is helpless. Maybe Shoen was counting on picking up a few of the Bills' castoff O linemen. Stafford was available...

Fitz didn't waste his time at Harvard. He's probably the smartest QB of his generation. He's articulate, charming, and down to earth. I remember reading that when he was living in the Buffalo area, he used to mow his own lawn. Now there might be other players who do that, but I'm doubting many people making QB money do. I wish he had a little more talent. He had a Brett Favre attacking style but not Favre's arm. With a little more throwing ability he could have been HOF worthy. As it was he was a journeyman who the really good teams wouldn't hire, so he settled for making mediocre teams better.

Hill didn't suddenly get faster. The Chargers D simply wasn't prepared for him. Which is odd because the Chargers used to face Hill twice a year, so they should have had a clue about how to stop him. Tua on balance had a very good game, but mostly he hit wide open receivers who ran for huge YAC. Any NFL QB could have completed those throws. He gets credit for completing the passes he did, but it was Hill's good play and the Chargers' lousy D that made Tua look good.

Interesting that this picks the Brown to win their division, with the Bengals and Ravens in as WCs.

My Lifelong Obsession With the Worst Team in the NFL - The Atlantic https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2023/09/detroit-lions-nfl-football-fan-defeat/675220/ Boy, when I was reading this, I kept thinking how it was just the same for Bills fans, but probably even worse, although the Bills never lost all their games in any season. The Bills have had five islands of competence in an ocean of muck -- the mid 60s AFL champs, the 73-75 Saban v.2 plus OJ years (more like a shoal than an island since they made the playoffs only once and lost that game), the Chuck Knox years, the great mountain of success and sadness in the early 90s, and now. Maybe 20 years, tops, of good play out of 62 or 63 years on the field. The Lions had the Packers who owned them. The 60s Bills had the Chiefs, the 70s Bills had the Dolphins, the 70s Bills had the Steelers, and the late 90s-early 2000s had the Patriots. Always a really dominant team that happened to be there whenever the Bills put together a decent team. The current team has played about even with their nemesis, the Chiefs, in the regular season, but hasn't broken through in the playoffs (yet?). The great writing in this article brought back memories. Alberta was glued to the TV during the draft the day his son was born. On the day our daughter was born, I was glued to the TV watching the Bills play the Dolphins, beating them to clinch the AFC East. Both of us report our wives being irked by this. I will say this about all the losing seasons. They do make the winning sweet. But then again I'd guess the Patriot fans felt pretty sweet about winning and winning and winning, over and over. They say hitting yourself in the head with a hammer makes you feel better when you stop, but I think never getting hit in the head in the first place is the way to go. Go Bills! THIS season is the "next year" as in "we'll get there next year."

He made more than $11M over the course of his career, which ended nearly 10 years ago (back when $11M was a lot of money 😜). He was a big strong man who could certainly manage working in construction, and if that's the path his life took, he apparently made the best of it. The news stories about his death started with a report from a Buffalo TV station, as far as I can tell, but I haven't seen anything that says specifically where the accident occurred that led to his death. Was it somewhere in the Buffalo area?

There you go. He's the reason they called it the K-Gun offense.

The great 90s team was built before free agency, and then held together during the early stages of FA (remember Plan B?), by the genius of Bill Polian. Polian couldn't do it today. He couldn't have kept Kelly, Thomas, Reed, Smith, Bennett, Hull and Talley together year after year, let alone the dozen or so A-listers who are overlooked now by the roster of truly great players. The only way to get a really good roster together is to do what Beane did in his early days, bite the bullet and clear out the salary cap deadwood, and then rebuild using a detailed knowledge of the quality of unvalued veterans (Poyer, Hyde). The only way to KEEP the good roster strong is to draft really well, and in that Beane has not held up his end. The Bills should already have the other superstars on the roster that the OP wants them to have. Instead we have Boogie Basham's empty locker, Epensesa on the way out, Elam buried on the depth chart, Oliver over-rated by a mile, Edmunds playing elsewhere so we could afford to keep Oliver, Wyatt Teller gone, two of our draft picks this year gone, the backup QBs we drafted gone, etc etc etc.

This is all wrong. Tight ends LAST names start with K. Knox, Kincaid, Kelce, Kittle.

Yeah, you could say it ended a little differently. 0-31 Pats beat the Bils by the mirror score.